Marshall Cheney Had Garner Fire Warrick

Josh Marshall has excellent analysis of Jay Garner’s BBC interview on the failing of the US in handling post-war Iraq. He confirms what I had suspected, which is that Dick Cheney had State Department Iraq expert Tom Warrick fired from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance because Cheney wanted to just turn Iraq over to fraudster Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Warrick had not been willing to kowtow to the INC and so became persona non grata with Cheney and his PNAC allies in the Pentagon. Marshall comments that Chalabi “played this town like a fiddle.” But it is also true that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith managed to hijack Iraq policy from the rest of the country, and Chalabi’s success was mainly in getting their ear.

Cheney and the others said they wanted to see democracy in Iraq! What they wanted was to install their corrupt stooge in power. There really isn’t a lot of difference between the Cheney vision of the Iraq war and Ariel Sharon’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which had been for the sake of installing Bashir Gemayyel permanently in power. (That did not work out, either).

There probably is enough in all this to launch an impeachment move against Cheney if the Democrats had the mean-spiritedness of their opponents.